The horrors of the Holocaust are so many that they’ll never
cease to tell compelling stories. One has to hand it to the Germans for
consistently acknowledging this dark chapter of their nation’s past. It’s no
wonder, then, that Labyrinth of Lies,
a film tackles the choice to make the Holocaust a collective responsibility
among Germans, this the country’s official submission for Best Foreign Language
Film in this year’s Academy Awards race. (The superior Phoenix is ineligible due to release dates.) This well-mounted
drama from director Giulio Ricciarelli is an impressive feature debut that puts
history on trial as one man seeks the truth.

Labyrinth of Lies dramatizes
the true story of a landmark case that rounded up not the usual suspects, but
dozens of Germans who contributed to the mass killings at Auschwitz with their
ever day actions.

The film puts ambitious prosecutor Johann Radmann (Alexander
Fehling) on an eye-opening investigation as one Holocaust survivor spots a camp
guard teaching schoolchildren, and goes to the police for justice. This prompts
a chilling question from the prosecutor: Just what, exactly, is Auschwitz?

This ornately shot and slickly designed drama presents
history objectively and humanely, but Labyrinth
of Lies also represents history safely. The film tells audiences about the
incalculable crimes of the Holocaust as ample montages feature witnesses giving
testimony with grave reaction shots from a stenographer, and the film somewhat
rests on the laurels of its true story. However, it’s a great and heroic story worth
telling.

The screenplay by Elisabeth Bartel simply, but smartly,
parallels Radmann’s personal unveiling of ignorance with the larger collective
awakening to the truths of Nazism as the prosecutor enlists countless survivors
to bear witness to the daily horrors of Auschwitz. Some of the stories are
familiar, like those outlining the nightmarish work of the notorious Dr.
Mengele (whose own story was recently dramatized in The German Doctor). Anything
from checking off a list to following orders is grounds for prosecution, and
deservedly so, as Radmann’s case compellingly argues that the toll of the death
camps is a collective responsibility, and one created by malice, seemingly
mundane actions, and willful blindness.

Labyrinth of Lies
offers strong thematic nods to Hannah Arendt as Radmann’s case puts the
banality of evil on trial. The film asks to what extent orders, or a sense of
duty, hold against crimes of greater moral, ethical, and legal stature.The film makes a strong case that any
action that contributes to the death, harm, violation, or degradation of
another human being bears a burden of culpability and moral responsibility even
if said action is inaction.

In this regard, though, Labyrinth
of Lies covers similar terrain as Stephen Daldry’s vastly superior The Reader as Radmann’s straightforward
procedural sidesteps the profound philosophical questions that make the trial
of Kate Winslet’s Hanna Schmitz so emotionally and philosophically profound. Labyrinth of Lies lacks the vital
element that makes film like The Reader
so crucially powerful: an everyday villain. Labyrinth
of Lies offers a collective villain in the character of Germany
complacency, but Radmann needs to confront his own monster. The film suffers
from Radmann’s own unshakable earnestness and one can’t help but watch and wait
for him to face the same central question that Hanna asks to make The Reader so unsettling: “What would
you have done?” Like Hanna’s former lover Michael does as he hears details of
Hanna’s crimes mirror her own power over him—moves with which he was enthrallingly
seduced—and realizes the ease with which one steps from the side of good to the
side of evil, her question makes one confront a moral abyss for which there are
no easy answers. To answer simply is to simplify a context of profound
complexity—and one which none of us can ever fully understand.